Sara Renee Marshall : part one

Sara Renee Marshall is the author of a few chapbooks, two of which are forthcoming this year from above/ground press. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, OmniVerse, jubilat, Jellyfish, in anthologies, and elsewhere. She has two degrees from University of Colorado, and she's working on a PhD at University of Georgia. With Thomas and her daughter Rosa Bernadette, she lives in Atlanta, Ga.

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I want to follow Nathanaël here, who said they distrust “any genre delineation,” but to be more specific, poetry is, for me, only a chronicle of associations, attachments, and limits that I remember as I practice them, transgress them, subvert them, or ignore them. For me, composing is bodily, affective, ambient, and anti-singular. I read while I write. I walk while I write. I parent and pee and half-sleep while I write. Its urges and impulses emerge from so many sources and forms that I can’t always say what I am writing is a poem or that what I have written is certainly a poem. Or maybe I am less interested in the provenance or jurisdiction of poetry than I am in the affective experience of generating writing in a broader sense.

So: I remain a bit ambivalent about what poetry can accomplish, but I feel certain that writing can move us, can be a space of communion, politics, music, pleasure, pain, and solidarity.